@Daniel The question of baking matzah has become a lot more nuanced in recent years. If you open up the Shulchan Arukh or the Mishneh Torah, the opinion is that you can't let flour that is now mixed with water sit unattended for 18 minutes. Add in several hundred years of stringencies and Jewish neuroticism, and now the general "accepted" halacha is that once the water hits the dough, it must be fully baked in under 18 minutes
So to ask "can i bake matzah with this according to halacha" might turn into an odd debate. With those who follow the rambam (who the yemenites follow) saying of course! Whereas others saying no
So there wasn't really a way for me to form a question that i thought was really answerable. But what might have been relevant was whether or not this advertisement had rabbinic endorsements or opinions. My sukkah kit and skhakh are plastered with names or Rabbis who approved each part ofit
@Aaron can Yemenite matza not be fully baked within 18 minutes of mixing? I've heard that R Herschel Scachter has said that it's fine for Ashkenazim to eat soft matza on Pesach, and I imagine he wouldn't if it couldn't comply with that chumra.
@IsaacMoses i'm not saying that it can't, but it isn't REQUIRED. As long as they continuously knead the dough, then according to the Rambam (and Yosef Caro), they can knead the dough all day long and it will never become chametz
@IsaacMoses And so i have no way of knowing how long this oven takes. And neither would those responding to a question of "can matzah be baked in this oven according to halacha"
@IsaacMoses Because what if the oven takes 20 minutes?
@IsaacMoses But either way, what interests me is the potential that this product has for my (and possibly others) Judaism. Because it offers the potential for one to bake their own matzah according to a tradition which is still living, which i find to be very on topic, i just don't know how to phrase the question better
A produce-recommendation question, on the other hand, asking for recommendations of devices that could be used to produce Yemenite matza, affordably, would be on-topic.
@IsaacMoses I considered fixing that for you, but I was curious about whether a discussion about varieties of wheat (or, for that matter, parsley or horseradish) would develop. :-)
@Daniel re your chat message to me: Two things. 1, sometimes the atopicality is only ostensible and would disappear in the brighter light of a clearly-worded question. [continued]
Sorry, I got pulled away. 2, there's some precedent for a combined lower score working against the scoree despite the seeming independence of the scored items. E.g. the SAT or ACT. Someone with high levels of two risk factors for a disease is more likely to develop it, lo alenu, than someone who has the same high level of only the one or the other factor.
@Aaron That why using "according to halacha" is a bad idea. Say "according to the Halacha XXXX of the Rambam in Hilkhot XXX X:X who permits doing XXX". All how-to posts should specify what Halacha they are working with.
Incidentally, most of us are in the know already that Matzos were soft originally. Your regular elaborate speeches about it are sorta patronizing, as if you were letting us in on a secret that the rest of the Jewish establishment has been hiding from us, when in actuality, the rest of us just don't see a need for our Kosher Matzot to look aesthetically similar to Moshe's and would indeed prefer that industrial Matza production use a system that reduces the possibility for error.
@DoubleAA Given the choice, I'd prefer an industrial system that reduces the possibility for undetected error and also produces a soft, tasty product. It might be difficult to distribute such a product over a wide area due to the inability to use preservatives or anti-stale agents (which I assume exist), but freezing may help.
... 21st-Century industrial quality-control equipment could, I expect, do a very good job of noticing and rejecting matzot or proto-matzot that deviate from the required process, especially if you have the money to invest in the right high-tech equipment. Given the prices people are willing to pay for matza, such money is probably available.
While the Rambam indeed says that it's 18 minutes of non working, R Yosef Karo says that after working the dough for as long as you want, if you let it sit for a moment it becomes Chametz. Rather a dangerous operation then.
The Rama too agrees that indefinite work is fine, but he holds that the 18 minutes of sitting still don't restart each time so they can combine over time, leading him to strongly encourage quick production.
@DoubleAA I'm not proposing a centrally-planned diktat to the matza industry. If soft matza was readily available to me with kashrut certification that I trust (and with all that that implies), I'd likely be willing to pay more for it than I would for the same amount of hard matza with the same hand/machine, shmura/not status.
Anyone here speak Russian? I'd be interested to know what this creepy chat-search result means, in context. GTranslate wasn't sufficient for this purpose, this time.
I'm excited about our new user Adam. He just joined yesterday and already had 3 high-quality answers. I love when a new user jumps in and seems to immediately understand the type of quality we want here
The only reasonable alternative translation I can think of is "On MY, they generallty vote by day of the week.".
(I don't know Russian.)
@IsaacMoses No, but Google Translate says that the post it's in reply to says "Vote on the level of language proficiency?" about a quotation. Which -- if correct -- I guess makes "On MY, they generallty vote by day of the week" more likely than "On MY, they generally vote on weekdays".
@msh210 The asker was clearly mistaken in thinking there were only 4, and a generalization would not invalidate any answers so would be permitted meta.judaism.stackexchange.com/q/1299/759
@msh210 Maybe "on weekdays" is a Russian colloquialism for something
@DoubleAA Ah. Indeed.
@DoubleAA @msh210 mistaken? I assume the fifth that we're talking about is at "'Oseh shalom bimromav ..." at the end of the postscript to the Amida. Why not assume that the question is specifically about the bowings that are during the berachot of the Amida?
@IsaacMoses You've made me look further. The first few hits I see for that phrase ("по дням недели") have it meaning "by day of the week", not "on weekdays".
@IsaacMoses Also, the Meta page you (@DoubleAA) linked to is about generalizing a case, not correcting a mistaken impression. That's usually done in answers, innit?
@IsaacMoses Yep. Apparently your answer was unconvincing (to him), at least long-term. Perhaps you should link in ru.SO chat to it.
@DoubleAA is it incontrovertibly the case that the fifth bowing's status is identical to those of the other four? If so, I support the edit. If not, I oppose it.
@IsaacMoses כריעה כיצד: המתפלל כורע חמש כריעות בכל תפילה ותפילה--בברכה ראשונה בתחילה ובסוף, ובהודיה בתחילה ובסוף. וכשגומר התפילה, כורע ופוסע שלוש פסיעות לאחוריו כשהוא כורע;
rambam tefila 5 something
@msh210 depends how essential the assumption is to the question imo. i dont think we have a policy here
i think having someone else ask a question if the 5th bow has the same rule is a waste of our time and space
I just wanted to revert bc of transliteration issues. that op would never have said "mid-dei" imho.
@msh210 To be fair we don't know whether or not the op was mistaken or only wanted to ask about these 4 to be arbitrary, but the generalization is useful either way.
@DoubleAA is it incontrovertibly the case that the fifth bowing's status is identical to those of the other four? If so, I support the edit. If not, I oppose it.
@DoubleAA I support that rollback. Answers are free to address the fifth in the name of completeness. It also seems possible that the answer might be different for the one at the end than the others, so this edit changes the question.
@IsaacMoses I think that's the question, too -- the four bows during the amidah, as opposed to the one at the end. If an answer also talks about the one at the end that's ok, but with that edit, an answer could talk only about the one at the end, thus failing to address the OP's actual question.
@IsaacMoses I missed this in my skim of the transcript before adding a later comment about the same thing. Yeah, that. I don't think we can assume that it has the same status.
@msh210 @IsaacMoses @MonicaCellio I don't see why that's the case. There are no answers doing that. There already is an answer addressing all 5.
The meta post is talking about "A question asks about case A. All the answers explain the rule with respect to cases A and B which have the same rule (or at least no one has yet to find a distinction)." That's this.
@DoubleAA do we disagree? The original question asks about four cases and an answer addresses those and one more. That's fine; it still answers the original question. But we shouldn't then edit the question to ask about five. You proposed rolling back the edit so I assumed you agreed with that. I'm trying to reinforce "yes, roll back", not argue against it.
Before this discussion I would not have assumed that the bowing during oseh shalom has the same status as the others; it's after, not during, so I could imagine the answer being: for the earlier ones go back and repeat, but not for the one at the end. I am not saying that's true; I'm saying that I can see an asker having that impression. So it seems odd to add a possibly-different case to his question. But I'm not going to get worked up about it.
כורע ופוסע ג' פסיעות לאחריו בכריעה אחת ואחר שפסע ג' פסיעות בעודו כורע קודם שיזקוף כשיאמר עושה שלום במרומיו והופך פניו לצד שמאלו וכשיאמר הוא יעשה שלום עלינו הופך פניו לצד ימינו ואחר כך ישתחוה לפניו כעבד הנפטר מרבו. He bows and steps back three steps behind him during the bow, and after he takes three steps while still bowed before he rises, when he says "oseh shalom bimromav" he turns his head to the left, and when he says "hu yaaseh shalom aleinu" he turns his head to the right, and then bows forward like a slave departing his master (my translation)
@msh210 Eh. I'm not jumping into a Russian conversation to try to defend MY's honor from a side-comment. There are enough of those in English that I don't jump in on.
@msh210 @DoubleAA But in any event it is after. Sh'mone esre ends after the last b'racha technically and after "Yihyu..." for most practical intents and purposes afaik.
@msh210 Well, the 18 blessings end after the 18 blessings by definition, but yes I guess it depends on what intents and purposes you have. As part of the full process of saying the required central prayer service, this seems definitely a part of it.
@DoubleAA s/Sh'mone esre/T'fila/ ; and I agree with what you just said. I'm just justifying the word "after". The bow is after the t'fila. But this is degenerating quickly into a discussion over word choice.
@DoubleAA Maybe the thing to do is to ask OP, via comment, if making it about all 5 is consistent with his intent. Or just make (/sustain) the edit and see if he objects. In either case, if he wants the question to be specifically about the first four, and preferably if he edits the question to say why, you should probably defer to that.
@DoubleAA Hey, i did not mean it to sound like i was letting you guys in on a secret here. i know many people here are aware of soft matzah, which is why i brought the question here to begin with. i was just trying to highlight that by leaving the general question to be "according to halacha" would receive many non helpful answers, as this device is probably not designed to follow those opinions
@IsaacMoses I'm ok with deferring to his explicit intent (if we get that), I suppose, but I think the current policy about generalizing is very clear and applies here.
@Aaron It shouldn't surprise you that asking a question different from what you want to ask would get you answers that aren't helpful for solving your question. That's certainly not due to any fault of Mi Yodeya's.
If you ask "according to Halacha" you will get answers from any interpretation of Halacha. If you want to ask "according to opinion Y" then asking "according to Halacha" will get you lots of unhelpful answers which don't agree with opinion Y.
What transliteration or anglicisation should we use for Hebrew words? Sometimes words are in the dictionary and have accepted spellings. Other times Hebrew words (names especially) have English versions of them that don't sound at all like the Hebrew.
There are also cases where there is not one ...
Several questions related to using Hebrew:
May I write בעברית? (Ie, using Hebrew script?) How about quotes?
Should I translate all non-obvious Hebrew words, even those transliterated in to English, like berakhah?
How about terms which have popular English translations, such as Bereishit vs Gen...
I know there is no official transliteration scheme for questions and answers,
but I noticed we are inconsistent in our tags. Consider the tags shabbat and tzitzis. Now it's true that shabbos and tzitzit both map to those as tag synonyms, but shouldn't we be consistent in choosing the default view...
@DoubleAA I believe our policy is that the author gets to choose his transliteration scheme, yes. This is consistent with other sites' policies about British vs. American English, for example. The general rule that I've seen on several sites is: don't impose your stylistic choices on somebody else's post.
@DoubleAA I still use that sometimes (mainly for "how did we spell/style the name of that parsha/masechet?" questions), but our failure to finish and maintain it is a limitation.
@IsaacMoses hmm, you'd think... still looking, but parts of this seem relevant (point 3 in particular).
I just saw someone edit the title of this question to change the spelling from favourite (The British spelling) to favorite (The US-English spelling).
Does SOFU have an accepted standard on language and spelling? Which is it?
@IsaacMoses hmm, kind of, but it doesn't make sense to render many of our tags in American English in the first place, so that just moves the problem to choosing among common transliteration schemes, where there's no clear winner.
Title states it all. The blurb in the 'about me' is not from me. I have no idea who gained access and placed this stuff there.
I'm leaving it there for now. Besides determining, perhaps, who may have done this, I think the rest of us should know the procedure if this occurs.
Thanks for your tim...
I just saw someone edit the title of this question to change the spelling from favourite (The British spelling) to favorite (The US-English spelling).
Does SOFU have an accepted standard on language and spelling? Which is it?
Title states it all. The blurb in the 'about me' is not from me. I have no idea who gained access and placed this stuff there.
I'm leaving it there for now. Besides determining, perhaps, who may have done this, I think the rest of us should know the procedure if this occurs.
Thanks for your tim...
